Lori Keeton's Reviews > Whose Names Are Unknown

First, I must offer thanks to those who made it possible for me to read this book: Thanks to Dave Marsland, Diane Barnes and Sara Steger for keeping the book alive! And Howard who brought it to our attention in the first place. All of their reviews are worth checking out.

Life could not be any harder than it was or money more scarce.

This is a novel that is hardly known and should be known by everyone. Written in 1939 by a woman who was just edged out on the publication of her novel by John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Sanora Babb had a masterpiece in her hands and the world wouldn’t know about it until it was finally published in 2004. This novel demonstrates the plight of the farmers who tried and failed to farm on the high plains of Oklahoma in land that was so unforgiving. These families withstood the droughts and the dust storms that occurred during the Great Depression and Babb writes with her first hand experience.

In this story, the Dunne family live a life of drudgery and hardship with no way to fight the natural disasters that wipe out their hopes and dreams - simple things like building a house of their own and having enough food to eat. Try as they might, the Dunnes are barely making ends meet when they are forced to abandon their land and head west to California where they expect to find a glorious promised land of blooming crops and green valleys and plenty of work and food for everyone. What they find is a place overrun by people just like them - destitute and starving refugees looking for work and living in tents or their cars hoping for a break that will help them feed their families. Many are immigrants but all are hardworking men and women who just need to work in order to survive. Their lives become migratory as they move from place to place picking peaches, prunes, apricots, cotton, etc. They discover a flawed system in which ‘those who have’ lord their power and status over ‘those who have nothing’.

In the last few years they had learned how to do without things they always considered necessities in other days. Maybe you wouldn’t call it hunger, he thought, but it’s a kind of left-handed starvation in more ways than one.

Babb’s novel is thankfully becoming more known and I hope that it will continue to spread its recognition. This is an important piece of history written by one who knew poverty. She was able to pack a big punch of themes into this slim novel - natural disasters, greed of banks and corporations, misuse and exploitation of workers. By the end, readers understand that men and women want to live lives with dignity.


A conversation with grandpa:

”Do you know everything, Konkie?”

“Not by a long shot! If I did I wouldn’t be in the fix I am.”

“Maybe when we grow up we can find out how to fix you,” Myra said.

“Maybe so. Maybe so. Maybe you can fix the world. It’s out of joint somewheres.”

“Maybe if it was fixed there wouldn’t be any poor people like us.”